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Well, I have to agree that getting stuck can really detract from enjoyment of a game. Does anyone recall trying to find that cursed bridle in King's Quest 4?
Or, for that matter, a friend of mine and I spent DAYS trying to figure out how to progress in Space Quest 4, only to EVENTUALLY discover that the only way to proceed was to stand in a very specific spot in the arcade in the Galaxy Galleria where the was nothing to look at or do and no explicit or even implied reason whatsoever to go stand in that spot. Stupid, stupid, stupid.

But that's not what I want to bring up. I want to bring up something else: itty bitty hotspots/objects:

Like the golden ball in KQ4. It's tiny! Sure, the parser is text so grabbing the ball isn't a problem, but NOTICING it is!
Or in Runaway (a more recent adventure game) there have been a number of times where the thing you need to grab to be able to progress is 5x5 pixels...tops! AND blends in with the scenery pretty badly. I think there was a sewing kit in the drag queens' bus, for example, that took me two bleedin' days to find.

I see this as a BIG no-no. If you have to resort to hiding important items by making them extremely wee and not at all contrasting with the BG, that's a sign of a weak game. Sure, it's way more difficult to come up with CLEVER puzzles that force your players to think, but tough, sez I. That's what makes a fun and well-made game. If it was EASY, everyone would do it every day.

Perspective is easy to kill:
Add a camera to scene, put it where it has to be, and from its settings, turn on "ortographic projection".

There.

Heh. I already brought that up. I didn't like the results I got from orthographic projection. I felt they looked more awkward than having a little perspective in there.

Besides, I took a look at some of Sierra's games--like Space Quest 4, for example--and though those characters aren't 3D, I noticed that they are moving as if they are in 3D space. For example, when a character is walking forward, like AGS's "Down" loop, the forward foot's pixels are below the rear foot's. So I think orthographic projection isn't the way to go, at least for my own taste.

But this thread is in wrong place: there's nothing to criticise or comment.

I'm not so sure about that. Oh, sure, I didn't post any artwork to look at (and I will, eventually; my laptop machine is my only internet access, and only then from a WiFi site, while my desktop machine at home is my production machine, so I'll have to transfer art from one to the other to show any of it...but I will!), but there's methodology in producing such art to comment on or criticize. Surely that qualifies. It seemed to, based on the description of this forum.

And where else to you go in this forum to talk shop, artwork-wise?

So I've started a game, but I've mostly been playing with the GUI system so far.

However, being a 3D animator of sorts, I've created the main character and rendered her out in 3D for all eight of the possible normal walking loops. I'll post some screenies of that at some point, I'm sure, but for now I have a question for anyone else who has done this:

What is your camera methodology?

Lemme explain: I have 3DS MAX (an ancient version, to be true, but it's legal and I'm broke, so upgrading isn't an option right now), just for reference.
I considered rendering my character out using orthographic projection so that perspective wasn't a problem, but this produced results I wasn't very happy with.
So I decided to go with a camera. But this had its own issues, namely perspective. If I placed the camera's viewpoint on my character's middle, she seemed to be looking up all the time. But moving the camera up to the face level had its own issues, such as leaving a huge empty space above the character's head if the frames were made large enough to  fit the whole character.
My eventual solution was the move the camera up a bit (to about chest level) and then tilt it down a bit, so the character filled the frame. The tilt is slight enough that the feet don't appear to shrink much due to perspective, and the head still looked like it was pointing up relative to the camera. So I tilted the head down a bit, which seemed to do the trick.
Of course, this had it's own issues, still. To maintain my lighting, I rotated the character in 3D rather than moving the camera. So now the head appeared to be pointing DOWN. Solution, titlt the head in an appropriate direction for rendering each loop's frames. On the diagonal walks, this meant tilting the head on two axes.

Ultimately, this technique really does look fine; unless you're looking for it, you probably won't notice that's it looks a bit awkward.
But I'm wondering how others who have rendered their characters in 3D have handled this issue.

Oh, I see. Somehow, I completely missed that aspect of the visible attribute, the part where Ypos GUIs were an exception to the way it worked. *facepalm*

Thanks.

Maybe this should be obvious, but I'm stumped:

I have a Sierra-style GUI bar that pops up when the mouse goes above y 13. Sometimes this GUI calls other GUIs, like my custom Inventory screen or the Quit/New/Cancel screen. When it does, however, the main GUI toolbar still pops up if the mouse goes above y 13!

How do I prevent this? The only GUIs that will pop-up AND require that the main toolbar CAN'T are called by the main toolbar GUI, so I can just put a command in the script for those toolbar buttons that call the sub-GUIs and turn it back on when those sub-GUIs go away. But I can't FIND one in the docs.

Thanks.

There's a lot of stuff in there. I'm bookmarking that for sure. Thanks!

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Are those in the docs anywhere? Cuz if so, I'm willing to bet there's other useful and interesting stuff in the same section.

Either way, thanks!

The documentation is a little unclear on these points, so I feel compelled to ask: Is there a way to get carriage returns and quotation marks in text that is displayed in text boxes or speech?

It's been a long time since I've done any coding, but IIRC, in Pascal you used to be able to just put double quotes ("") inside single quotes to produce a quotation mark in a non-variable string you were displaying to the screen, but I don't know if that would work in AGS. If I need a character to say something like:

The title of the book is "Astral Projection", and is on the third shelf.

then I'll need quotation marks.

Similarly, I'm not sure how to get a carriage return in text in AGS. My characters are likely to get rather verbose and I'll probably need a paragraph break once or twice WITHOUT jumping to another Say command. I could probably just plug in the ASCII code for it (13, IIRC), but the docs are desperately unclear on that functionality. In the String Formatting section, %c is the only one that DOESN'T get an example. Where does the ASCII code go? Before the c? After the c? Is c a variable that has to be declared outside the string?

For that matter, is there a way to give displayed or spoken text dimensions? As in, like, margins? If a character has a lot to say, it tends to spread all the way across the screen rather than staying confined to a space similarly sized to the character's dimensions. It kinna loses association with the character that way, and I'd prefer to be able to confine at least spoken text to a certain amount of space above the character, LucasArts-style.

I realize these should probably be self evident, but I'm still confused. Sorry, and thanks!